Metro News & Reviews

Trip2GO needs volunteers for study about daily travel in L.A.

Trip2GO, a multimodal trip planning app developed by Metro, Caltrans, Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology (PATH) and UC Berkeley, is looking for volunteers to participate in a study on daily travel in the Los Angeles area. Participation is easy, and participants will also receive gift cards worth up to $100!

Are you eligible? You must have an Android smart phone and live/work in the travel corridor that runs from Pasadena through downtown Los Angeles to Long Beach.

What’s involved? Participants will complete a couple of questionnaires online about their households and travel choices. They can also earn more rewards by filling out a few shorter questionnaires about daily trips. The research team will analyze the data and use the results to hopefully improve travel forecasting and planning.

How do I sign up? The sign-up period will be open until July 31, 2015. Participants must be able to commit to a 2-week period of daily testing. If you’re interested, fill out this form to get started!

Simpler solution is to just partner up with Google and ask them for the data. Chances are most people just leave the Google Now and Google Location History feature on so they already have tons of data spanning months, if not several years from Android smartphone/tablet users based on GPS and cell signal data on where they live, where they work, and what their daily routes are to get there.

The vast majority have 9-5 jobs during the weekday.

Obviously if you’re NOT on the go from 18:00 evening to 07:00 the next day in a particular location almost everyday of the weekday, that’s likely where you live. Google can derive that info from those sets of data.

And if you’re at another location and NOT moving from 09:00 to 17:00 every weekday, then that’s likely where that person is working. Google can derive that info from those sets of data.

Google also tracks how you get there. Super-impose the data over Google Maps, Google already knows how you get between your home and your workplace.

They’ve been doing this for years across millions of Android users so they already have tons of data to work from and I’m sure they’ll have years of data from Angelenos as well. These data are likely to become their backbone of their Google driverless car technology – if they know where people live, where they work, and how they get there, spanning months and years of data, they can derive the best way to deploy their Google driverless cars to start running along a particular set route when they hit the market.

Again, how typical of LA that the only choices of transportation on this app is comparing car vs. mass transit, but nary a peep about a third alternative that increasing number of Millennials are opting to do today: riding a motorcycle, scooter or a moped to get around.

I’m sensing an underlying motive here of promoting confirmation bias that this app was made so that results are skewed to show that it’s cheaper to take transit over cars, when in fact, it leaves out other variables like commuting with two wheel motorized vehicles which isn’t accounted for nor addresses the travel needs and variability of how people travel throughout the southland. By limiting it to only the Blue/Gold Line sector (Pasadena through DTLA to Long Beach? Hmm, sounds awfully skewed to promote the Blue and Gold Lines!), it really limits the reality of how Angelenos actually travel which can be all over the place and varies widely by the distance.

Really Metro, you’ve stooped to a new low – using our tax dollars to promote your bias to socially engineer people to take transit, without accounting for all the variables.

The app also fails to explain how the “cost” and “carbon footprint” figures are derived for cars to compare with transit. You can’t give a fair comparison to the cost of Metro which is fixed versus to a car which has a lot of variables.

The automobile itself has many different categories today from those that do not require fossil fuels, to one that runs on hybrid engines, or traditional combustion engines which in itself can vary widely whether the car was built in the 1970s or the 2010s, whether it’s gas-guzzling Hummer or a fuel efficient Honda Civic.

The cost of a car ownership also varies widely in terms of insurance and maintenance depending on what car you own. A Maybach or a Ferrari is going to be a lot more expensive to maintain than a Ford Focus.

In order for this app to be a true study to compare against automobiles vs transit, it must also be allowed to enter one’s own vehicle, the cost of gasoline per fill up, odometer readings at each fill-up, keep a record of the MPG and the cost per mile of that car, as well as input the relevant data on insurance premiums and maintenance costs.

Yes, if you live or work along the corridor, you may be eligible. Not sure about how wide the travel corridor is though. If you would like details, please email the app team directly: trip2goapp@gmail.com

“…and live/work in the travel corridor that runs from Pasadena through downtown Los Angeles to Long Beach.”

Too limiting. Not everyone in LA lives or works in the coridor between Pasadena, Downtown LA and LB . The sample size will to be too small and the criteria too limiting to offer any substantial data or empirical evidence for a commuter study.